7 Elite Secrets To Focusing In An Age of Distraction

In the first 11 minutes of trying to write this article, I checked email three times, spotted a note that prompted me to set in motion another task before writing, then saw another message reminding me I had forgotten to pay for something and so logged into
PayPal to do so, then remembered I wanted to transfer money from my business checking into my personal checking, did that, and then I finally closed the email and all my different bank browsers and got down to writing.

Seven minutes later, after resisting the urge to check
Facebook and
Twitter on my iPhone several times, I moved the shiny addiction machine out of view.

I was demonstrating perfectly the very problems that Cal Newport, a Georgetown computer science professor, aims to help our Internet-addled brains overcome in “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.” Chock-full of psychology studies and practical tips, his book makes a strong case that high-level concentration is becoming not only ever more difficult but also increasingly rare and valuable — and that the ability to do it is a ticket not just to a promotion, but even to a better life.

Cal Newport

Newport, who made efficient use of his time by commuting home during our interview, defines deep work as “focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task.” He also adds, “that’s the state in which you can learn complicated things quickly and [in which you can] produce output at a much higher rate and a much higher level of quality than more distracted work.” As you might expect of people doing complicated work more quickly than others, he says, “If you actually master this tool and use it regularly, you are going to quickly move ahead of your peers.”

Newport, who has never succumbed to Facebook and minimizes his email use, says, “The way that we treat communication in our workflow in the knowledge era would be the equivalent of going back to the Industrial Age and making the assembly line workers wear clumsy gloves that made it hard for them to use their tools so they’d make lots of mistakes and be slow in building the product.” Citing the expectation to always be on email, IM or
Slack, he continues, “The way we communicate in a knowledge era is putting clumsy gloves on our minds. It’s impairing your cognitive capability and knowledge workers are producing their output at much less productivity and with much less value.”

Newport says that managing one's attention not only makes you more productive, but also is, in the words of science writer Winifred Gallagher, “the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.”

Here are seven tips for learning to do deep work and cultivating time for it.

1. Be bad at email.

Stanford science professor Donald Knuth, who was liberated from email on January 1, 1990, wrote on his website, “email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.”

In fact, it would probably behoove you to be bad at all sorts of busywork. The late Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman avoided administrative tasks by telling people who had asked him, for instance, to serve on an admissions committee, “No, I’m irresponsible.”

Newport advises people to resist the urge to appear to be productive by conducting activities in a visible manner. For example, emailing at all hours, attending lots of meetings and constantly instant messaging may feel productive, but are not.

“We have this social convention that every email deserves a reply. I recommend that people flout that social convention. Just don’t answer emails if you can get away with it,” says Newport.

2. Embrace boredom.

“Once you’re wired for distraction, you crave it,” writes Newport. He says you need to rewire your brain so that it’s more likely to stay focused. To that end, instead of carving work hours out of the time that you are otherwise preoccupied by Facebook, Twitter and email, schedule your Internet use and then otherwise avoid it. “Outside of those times, the default is to do none of those activities. It helps your mind get more comfortable with being bored, with being free from novel stimuli at all times,” he says. “That comfort is necessary to support deep work down the line.”

If you find this difficult, start by keeping near your computer a notepad on which you record the next time you’re allowed to use the Internet — and resist it at all costs until then. If you need the Internet for your work, try an app that blocks specific websites, such as Anti-Social. To further improve your concentration, schedule your home Internet use, so that your non-work hours don’t defeat your resistance training while at work.

Just a warning: Newport says that most people tell him this was hard. “People underestimate how addicted they’ve become to having novel stimuli at the slightest hint of boredom,” he says.

3. Don’t do something just because it offers some benefit.

There are any number of tools we can use for our work, however, Newport suggests you ruthlessly cull the ones you use down to only those whose positive impacts outweigh their downsides. For instance, famed authors Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Lewis don’t use Twitter. Though they acknowledge that it’s useful for other writers, it doesn’t offer them enough advantages to offset its disadvantages.

To not to be seduced by the fact that a tool may offer any benefit at all, Newport recommends that you identify the main high-level goals in your professional life. Then, identify the two or three most important activities that will help you reach those goals and consider which tools would have a substantially positive impact, a substantially negative impact or little impact on the activity. Only choose the tools with substantial positive impacts that outweigh their negative effects.

4. Follow the Law of the Vital Few.

This law says, “In many settings, 80% of a given effect is due to just 20% of the possible causes.” Newport says that when it comes to achieving your main goals, you could probably identify the 20% of activities that get you 80% closer to your goals.

“The things that you do best produce way more value than the things you don’t do as well,” he says, “so one hour spent working intensely on something that you’re highly skilled at is going to produce way more value than one hour spent on something that is not as highly skilled.”

One way to help you decide what to focus on is to ask yourself how long it would take you to train a recent college grad to do that particular skill. “The type of tasks that require deep work are tasks that require you to apply skills that you’ve developed over time that produce new value and it would be hard for someone without your training to replicate,” he says. So for example, answering emails, attending a meeting or creating a PowerPoint presentation probably do not use your special skills. However, creating a new business strategy, coding a complicated algorithm, solving a math theorem, or writing a book chapter in your area of expertise would be hard for a recent college grad to replicate. Focus on these tasks.

5. Quit social media.

You know those people who, to declutter, put all their belongings in a box and then only keep the ones they actually take out and use over the next few months? Newport recommends you do this with the social media platforms you use — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, Google+, Vine — by not using them for 30 days. No need to deactivate your memberships or even announce your hiatus. But at the end of 30 days, for each social media outlet, ask yourself two questions: if the past 30 days would’ve been better if you had been able to use the service and if people cared that you weren’t using the service. For any social media outlets where the answer to both is no, he recommends you quit the service. If your answer to both was yes, you can resume using the service.

This might sound scary, but Newport says most people find this much easier than they expect. “People think that the hardest thing that I suggest to actually put into practice would be quitting social media,” says Newport, “and yet in my experience, what happens is those who do this then come back and say, ‘Oh. Why didn’t I do this earlier? Why was I spending so much time with these services? That wasn’t hard at all.’”

6. Treat your work time like a scarce commodity.

Newport describes a four-day workweek experiment that Jason Fried, the cofounder of software firm 37signals, tried with all employees. Fried discovered, “Once everyone has less time to get their stuff done, they respect that time even more. People become stingy with their time… they don’t waste it on things that just don’t matter. When you have fewer hours you usually spend them more wisely.”

The experiment went so well, the company gave employees the month of June to work on their own projects. The end result? Two projects that are projected to significantly improve the company’s workings.

Newport also describes how renowned Wharton business school professor Adam Grant, the youngest professor to have been granted tenure there, teaches only in the fall, leaving the spring and summer open to devote his full attention to research. Within these longer stretches, he dives even deeper in mini-sessions of three or four days, during which he puts an out-of-office auto-response on his email so he can concentrate on a single task. He’s still in his office — he’s just announcing he will not be responding to email because he wants to work uninterrupted for several days.

7. Get others on board.

If you work in a company that does not yet recognize the danger of what Newport calls shallow work — which is the busywork that is not cognitively demanding, tends to concern logistics and can be performed while distracted — talk with your manager to see how you can integrate more deep work into your role.

Start by defining the terms deep and shallow work and then ask, “What proportion of deep to shallow work hours should I be aiming for in my week?” While you may be nervous to do this, a study by Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow conducted with the Boston Consulting Group found that the culture around shallow work had never been openly discussed, but once the team began talking about it, they agreed to eliminate the expectations that they would always be on email, etc.

“So if you’re concerned that your organization could never support deep work,” he says, “I suggest that you open up a conversation with your colleagues, and your boss, and your managers about deep work, what role it should play, and what would help it and I think you would be surprised by how many positive supportive changes that could quickly generate.”